Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) can aid recovery from brain injuries, such as stroke. BMIs are also powerful research tools for understanding learning in healthy and injured brains. Sleep is known to play a crucial role in learning and memory, and recent work has shown that sleep is a vital factor in learning to interact with a brain-machine interface. This NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project lays the foundation for a research and education program that will discover the links between sleep-associated reorganization in healthy and stroke-injured brains that help in learning a brain-machine interface skill. It will also test whether stimulating certain phases of sleep can boost learning. An improved understanding of the science behind neuroprosthetic skill learning can lead to new insights into how stroke impacts the brain’s sleep-related learning. The results of this work could be used to help design sleep-focused rehabilitation programs and BMI systems for those suffering from stroke.
Brain-machine interfaces offer a powerful technology that merges the computational power of nervous systems with that of artificial electronic systems. BMI learning lends itself to probing sensorimotor plasticity in the brain, and recent work has revealed offline processes in the motor cortex that lead to performance gains while learning a neuroprosthetic motor task. Furthermore, motor cortical stimulation and cerebellar deep nuclei stimulation have both shown promise in promoting motor recovery post-stroke. However, these stimulations have been applied during awake periods. Whether there is any coordinated offline sleep-related processing in these regions and whether such offline activity can be optimized to promote learning of a neuroprosthetic skill remains untested. The research performed under this NSF CAREER project aims to delineate the offline processes in cortico-cerebellar areas of rodents during the learning of a neuroprosthetic task, to understand the neural basis of BMI learning in these regions. The investigators will perform studies in healthy and stroke-injured rats and focus on sleep processing that contributes to learning a BMI skill. The investigators will take a systems-level approach to: (i) characterize the sleep stages and neural processing in cortico-cerebellar ensembles that help in consolidating a neuroprosthetic skill in the intact and the stroke-injured brain; and (ii) test if augmentation of neural processes during sleep in these regions can be used to enhance learning and recovery of a neuroprosthetic skill.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
